I just joined a book community called genrereviews that looked fun in terms of its discussions about books. What immediately caught my eye looking back over the recent entries was one asking whether we trusted Amazon reviews. Now I tend to not read amazon reviews and synopsis because of the tendency for them to give spoilers, though will sometimes glance at the numbers of stars.

With my latest review posted this morning of Scott Smith's The Ruins (this one has spoilers, which I usually avoid but I needed to rant) I can't blame reviews as I borrowed it based on remarks I had seen about its alleged theme of Mayan ruins and horror in the jungle. The glowing reviews I read were after the fact and to be fair to Amazon reviewers there were plenty of 1 & 2 star ones.

What caught my eye in the genrereviews entry were links to the Dear Author blog, about a scandal involving a paranormal/romance writer's campaign against a reviewer who had given her book a 3-star rating on amazon. A summary post with links can be found here. Basically it is highlighting the phenomena of 'attack author's who seek to have bad reviews removed and also use their influence to get higher ratings by having friends submit high reviews.

Looking deeper into the phenomena I looked up the offending author's (Deborah MacGillivray) review page at amazon.co.uk and it seems the woman doesn't have a critical bone in her body as pretty much all the 900+ reviews she gives are 5-star and are glowing with praise. For her own novels there seem to be tons of 5-star ones and maybe one dissenting 1-star! This is just unrealistic. There are always a range of responses to novels and movies. I try to find good points in the books I read but a 5-star review is still more of an occasional thing when something wows me.

Thinking that the community over on Goodreads.com would be less effected by this type of manipulation I found that again her novels were getting average ratings of 4.75ish. Looking at them at random there was perhaps one or two that seemed genuine with reviews actually being given the book and then a whole bunch of others where all someone had done was enter 5 stars against the title. Looking at the Goodreads home pages of these members at random there are no profiles and pages of 5-star ratings with no comment at all, all added pretty much on the same day. No 'currently reading', no 'to be read' books. I don't think it takes an Agatha Christie sleuth to figure out something is fishy there!

Even Ms. MacGillivray's own Goodread's page again has 8 pages of 5-star ratings without even bothering to do the reviews she did on Amazon or giving indications that she is a genuine member (again no currently reading). All this seems to suggest a strategy to boost the ratings of certain authors' books in a reciprocal arrangement or using fake Ids.